Minsk
by IseultLaBelle
Summary: Ange, Dom and Chloe visit Winchester Christmas Market for some last minute Christmas shopping. Ange encounters an unwelcome reminder of Chloe's father. Sequel to Belarus/Alba, Bela, two parter.


**So this was originally going to be Belarus part two, but it's turned into a two parter in its own right and it doesn't quite fit with Belarus, so it's now a stand-alone story. Minsk is the Belarusian capital- it will make more sense in part two, but just so you know now! **

**This is the first of two Christmas/Hogmanay stories I'm finishing at the moment- I know they****'re a bit late, I was totally on track until I was ill for half of December and then I just got completely behind. But I am aiming to get them both uploaded in their entireties ASAP I ****promise! And it's not Christmas in Belarus until January... see, it's totally not late. I planned it. (I definitely didn't.)**

**Reviews would make me very happy- constructive criticism also ****welcome! And thank you so much to all of you reading for letting me write this series and embracing my crazy theories. You are wonderful. **

**-IseultLaBelle x **

"Jesus fucking Christ, four fucking quid for a wee half pint?"

"We're the oldest pub in England, madam, we can trace our roots back to the time of King Alfred. Not this building, of course, but this land." The bartender stares Ange down hard, unimpressed.

"Oh really? And I bet you ripped him off, too. No wonder you English lost out to the Norman conquest, your army probably died of dehydration because they couldn't afford your fucking beer. Come on, Dom, Chloe, we'll try somewhere else."

She shivers a little, reaches out instinctively for Chloe, pulls her into her side and wraps one arm around her back, other hand squeezes her forearm, as the bitter December cold hits them from the doorstep before they're even out onto the street again, because she knows if she's cold, Chloe is going to be half frozen to death.

Perhaps this wasn't the best idea, Ange considers. Not with snow forecast for this weekend, not when Chloe is thinner than she's seen her in years, fragile, shaky, wanders around her flat after work wrapped up in her children's section penguin onesie, her thermal socks and half the blankets she owns draped around her shoulders, cries out in her sleep to an absent attacker, according to Cam and Nicky, and it's been so much worse since she discovered she was pregnant.

(It's not spying. It's just… checking up on her.)

But then she needs to keep getting her out the house, Ange had told herself. She needs to keep getting her out the house before she starts working herself into a panic about that, too, needs to distract her, keep her occupied, anything at all to stop her mind wandering back to that awful day at Cam's mother's cottage, to the abortion clinic, to _Evan_.

That, and Nicky texted her discretely the other night, told her Chloe had locked herself in the bathroom for rather a long time after they got in from work, blamed it on her IBD but she'd found bloody loo roll, antiseptic wipes and plaster packaging in the bin when she finally emerged.

Ange shudders, grips onto Chloe a little tighter.

Maybe she should never have brought her out today. Maybe she should have picked Chloe up and brought her back to hers instead, maybe they should have spent today curled up on the sofa watching Christmas films, working their way through Chloe's revolting almond milk baileys (plant milk is the future, apparently) and their body weight in mince pies.

But then today is for Dom, Ange reminds herself.

She promised.

Dom and Carole are spending Christmas with her and Chloe this year, with her mum and her grandparents on the Isle of Skye, and Ange has promised to show him around Glasgow, where she grew up, en route to the ferry crossing.

In return, Dom is excitedly showing her and Chloe around Winchester, where he grew up, has assured them that this is the best possible time of year to come to his hometown, when the Christmas markets have opened and there's an unlimited supply of mulled wine and German-style hot dogs.

Ange's first instinct had been to cancel, this morning, when she picked up a trembling, exhausted Chloe en route to meet Dom at the train station, instantly worried that a four-hour round trip on the train and a day wandering around Winchester in minus one degrees was going to prove too much for her, but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it.

Dom would be crushed, for a start, and she really does need to get better at balancing the needs of both her babies.

That, and she knows full well how badly Chloe would have taken it if she'd even dared suggest they call the whole thing off and tell Dom she isn't well enough to go out today.

But still. She's so bloody _thin_, and she's shivering, even in Ange's enormous padded coat over the top of her own fluffy cream_thing_that Ange dismissed as totally Chloe's colour but utterly useless in actual cold weather on the doorstep when she picked her up. And it isn't even just the two coats; she's also wearing a knitted hat and a giant tartan scarf she could practically wear as a blanket, and yet still she's shivering as though they've dragged her to the Arctic Circle, not Winchester- in cold weather, yes, but not exactly bitterly so, not when she raised Chloe in the north-east of Scotland with its proper, freezing winters. And she's subdued, worryingly so; she's hardly said a word all day so far, spent most of the train journey fast asleep with her head resting against Ange's chest (and she's always been terrible at sleeping on public transport).

Ange is convinced she isn't sleeping at home.

She's convinced she isn't eating either, isn't taking care of herself, isn't _coping_, come to that.

The only thing Ange is convinced of is that her daughter is self-harming again, and she doesn't have the faintest idea what to do about it.

"We could just go through to the Christmas market?" Dom suggests, as they step out onto the street again. "They'll have food, we could…"

"I know," Ange agrees. "I'm just… I'm not sure it's the best idea. I think if we're going to wander around in the cold later we probably need to get Chloe warm first and…"

"I'm _fine_." Chloe pouts at her, pulls her best unimpressed face at the fuss her mother is making of her, but Ange knows her well enough to look beyond her protests.

She knows her daughter is still struggling more than she'd ever be prepared to let on.

She's not regretting her decision.

No part of Ange thinks that.

Not when it was perfectly clear to her that no part of Chloe wanted to become a mother anytime soon, to take on that responsibility when she seems to be fully aware of how much she's struggling herself just now, let alone to Evan's baby.

It's not regret.

It's just that the realisation she was pregnant, the having to do something about it, has brought everything back for her, and she doesn't know how to deal with it.

Not without turning to self-harming, anyway.

"Ange might have a point," Dom suggests carefully, seems to catch on. "Chlo? You look cold…"

"I'm not, I'm fine." Chloe glares at them both furiously as she shivers, wraps her arms around herself, except her eyes tell a different story, Ange realises now, don't capture the exasperation she was initially expecting to see.

She's not fine.

It's evident from the look in Chloe's eyes that she's not fine at all, but still she pleads with them both to drop it.

"Okay." Dom seems to realise that Ange doesn't quite have it in her to take control of the situation as Chloe needs them to, can't bring herself to just brush it all aside, pretend as though there's nothing wrong, ignore Chloe's anxious, traumatised expression, her shivering, the slight blue tinge to her lips and redness to her eyes, fighting against all her maternal instinct screaming at her to take Chloe back to the train station, take her home, somehow persuade her to open up, because she knows the warning signs only too well, and she doesn't like this, not one bit. "Okay. Okay, you're fine, Chlo, we're sorry. Come on, then." Dom drapes his arm around Chloe's shoulders, steers her gently until she's in between the three of them, protected, her own personal bodyguards and cheer squad and emotional support all rolled into one. "Oh my god, your hands are freezing."

"My hands are always freezing."

"Not that freezing, they're not."

"You didn't know me last winter."

"No," Dom admits. "No, but no one's hands are normally that cold. Right, you can have my gloves. There you go."

"You need them."

"No, I don't, I wasn't even wearing them. Luckily for you, I just happened to have them in my coat pocket. Go on, then, they're yours now. You wear them. You know, before you end up with frostbite. You're wearing two coats, how are you still so cold?"

"She has the worst circulation I've ever seen," Ange agrees, wraps her own arm around Chloe's shoulders, Godard family huddle for warmth. "If you have a solution, do let us know, won't you? I've been trying to come up with one for nearly thirty years and I'm still no further forward."

"You haven't been tested for Raynaud's Disease, have you?"

"Yep, Mum insisted. It's not that. I've just got crap circulation. Like, seriously crap."

She's never told Chloe, of course, and certainly not Dom.

But Chloe's alarming inability to cope with the cold makes even less sense when placed within the full picture, when considered alongside the missing half of her heritage Ange has kept a closely guarded secret for the best part of three decades, now, hidden away, back of her mind, except for situations such as this.

There's another life, a parallel universe, in which Chloe would have grown up in the radioactive wastelands of Mazyr, if she'd been fully that monster's child, from his heritage, his background, if he'd never been in Glasgow the summer of 1989, if she'd been born to a local woman in Gomel Oblast instead.

Maybe not even that.

She could have decided she couldn't cope with becoming a teen mum all over again, after all. What would have happened then? She could have tried to put Chloe up for adoption, but what if his family had found out she was his, what if her paternal grandmother had insisted on taking her instead, applied for a passport and put her on a plane and flown her off onto the very edges of the exclusion zone, Chernobyl nuclear fallout poisoning everything second by second since the catastrophe of 1986 and doomed to for generations yet.

Because when the nuclear reactor exploded in Pripyat, the majority of the radiation bypassed Ukraine completely- the worst of it, at least.

It drifted over the border into Belarus instead, poisoned Mazyr forever, right on the edges of the Pripyat River, mere miles from the reactor on the Ukrainian side of the Soviet boundary lines.

She hadn't known that, at the time. Giving up Chloe had never been an option, never something Ange was prepared to consider even for a moment, and certainly not to _his_family.

But even so. She hadn't known all that back then: the extent of the radiation damage to the southern border of the land of Chloe's sperm donor's family, the irreversible damage that must have been done to their very genetic makeup long before they boarded a flight to Glasgow.

She thinks about them, sometimes.

She thinks about the alarmingly increased risks of cancer, thyroid problems, birth defects, cardiovascular disease, mental health conditions, and still the list goes on.

Just the thought of Chloe being exposed to any of that makes Ange shudder.

But still.

The point is, Chloe's awful circulation makes even less sense when slotted into the full picture of her genetics, because she's not just built for Glasgow winters, for icy waves lapping against the rocks on Skye.

Half for that, yes.

The other half of her is built for Belarusian ice and snow from November through to April, minus temperatures for months on end and bitter winds, survival mode, harsh chills.

Ange can't imagine Chloe lasting five minutes in a Belarusian winter.

Not that she has first-hand experience, of course.

She's never been to Belarus, wouldn't even know where it was if it weren't for how she had Chloe, and Ange has absolutely no intention of changing that.

There's certainly no way Chloe is going anywhere near the radiation fallout; not if Ange has anything to do with it.

(And by that, she means the whole of Belarus. And perhaps it's unfair to condemn an entire country, write it all off as too dangerous, too toxic. But she's her mother, and she worries enough as it is, worries that the very DNA Chloe inherited from the man who fathered her is mutated, damaged, riddled with cancerous potential and she'll be accompanying her to oncology appointments before she's forty, entirely the wrong way around. `There's no way she's allowing Chloe to expose herself to additional Chernobyl fallout radiation on top of whatever might already cling to the stands of half her DNA.)

No; Ange has never been to Belarus, has gaged everything she knows about winter there from travel guides and Apple Weather, and so perhaps she isn't in a position to truly judge. But then Chloe barely coped with Aberdeen winters, before they moved away; she used to have to raid the thermals section in M and S for Chloe every year and it would cost her an absolute fortune, but there was no way she was sending her daughter off to school freezing half to death, her hands and her lips turning blue from five minutes spent outside in the cold, feet numb, shivering, frozen through.

She can't imagine Chloe surviving a winter in Mazyr.

She can't understand how Chloe can be so shockingly awful at coping with the cold when half of her is Slavic, supposedly adapted for exactly this, robust, hardened to ice and snow, come to that.

Sometimes, if Chloe weren't the spitting image of him, his female double, Ange would struggle to believe that her lovely daughter is anything to do with the man who raped her at all.

She guards Chloe protectively, as they queue to enter the Christmas market.

She's suddenly aware that they're surrounded by people, can hardly move, fenced in, casts her mind back to those first few weeks, months, even, after it happened to her, when she was in the early days of her pregnancy with Chloe and she hadn't even known it.

She hated large crowds, Ange remembers.

She felt so claustrophobic in situations like this, painfully untrusting of everyone around her, came to view all strangers as a potential threat, a danger, crowded places as a situation she desperately needed to remove herself from as quickly as possible, because what if it happened again? What if someone tried to touch her up and there was nowhere to go, no moving away from them, what if she told them to stop and they just wouldn't let go… what then?

God, she should have thought this through, before she agreed with Dom that Winchester Christmas Market was a good idea.

And so, she keeps her arms firmly around Chloe's shoulders as they stand in the queue, crammed in between the cathedral and the ice rink that seems to mark the start of the Christmas market and freedom to move at last. She glares furiously at the group of middle-aged men, cider bottles in hand, stood beside them, dares them to defy her best mother lioness act and come near her daughter, does her best to communicate through her expression exactly what she'll do to them if they lay a finger on her littlest lion cub.

Dom seems to understand today.

Thank god.

It's been difficult, the adjustment period, Ange ponders as they finally make it in through the market entrance, Dom making a beeline for the drinks stall, Chloe leaning against her side as she clings onto her arm, determined not to be separated from her daughter.

It's been difficult, but they seem to be coming out the other end of it all now, seem to be finally getting used to each other, establishing proper family relationships.

It was always going to take Chloe a while to get her head around having a brother, having to share her mum. She'd seen that, at the beginning; it was one of the many reasons she was so determined to take things slowly, one of the many things Dom just hadn't quite understood at first. And she had made a mess of things too, admittedly, because she'd wanted to just work towards treating Dom as she'd always treated Chloe at first, conscious that there was a long, long way to go but with the same end goal in mind, hadn't appreciated that her children are two completely different people, different personalities, different temperaments.

They both need her, Ange has come to realise. Even with the… unconventional way in which Dom has come back into her life, they both need her.

They just need her in two completely different ways.

"Do you want a mulled wine?" Ange offers as they catch up with Dom, almost at the front of the drinks queue. "We're not driving back, are we? Or not until we get back to the station at Holby, anyway, we can…"

"Only if you're paying," Dom retorts, eyes widening. "They're a fiver each."

"Fuck's sake. What is it about the English, tiniest bit of ancient history and you put up all the fucking prices."

"I don't think Edinburgh is exactly cheap either, actually. And Edinburgh has…"

"Not the point."

"Don't take Mum on when it comes to Scotland," Chloe advises Dom, rolls her eyes in mock exasperation. "You won't win. She'll never accept there's anything wrong with Scotland unless it's the result of Indy Ref."

"Hey, you agree with me on that one!" Ange protests, rummages in her purse for cash to pay for ridiculously overpriced English mulled wine. "Not that you have any choice, obviously. I'll disown you if you ever decide independence isn't Scotland's destiny, you know that. Right, Chloe, do you want to give me your reusable cup thing? Since you're adamant you can't ever touch a paper one again."

"They're terrible for the planet, Mum, of course I'm not if I can avoid them. Seriously, though. She's probably got you Nicola Sturgeon's biography for Christmas, Dom," Chloe warns now.

"Chloe! Stop ruining your brother's Christmas presents. Right, one stupidly expensive mulled wine and amaretto." She hands the paper cup to Dom, turns back to the counter to retrieve Chloe's reusable cup and her own polar-bear-killing paper one, frowns. "Where did Chloe go?"

"Dog's Trust." Dom gestures, rolls his eyes.

She only turned her back on her children for all of twenty seconds, but apparently it was long enough for Chloe to spot the Dogs Trust charity collection stall a couple of Christmas market huts down, happily skip over and befriend all four of the dogs there, crouched down, one in her arms, one set of paws on each shoulder, noses pressed up against her face, another happily climbing up her back, licking her ears.

"Rather her than me," Dom comments, pulls a face. "I mean, I love dogs, and everything, but how have they not knocked her over? And all the dog slobber."

"Oh, I know. I can't say I'm surprised," Ange sighs. "I swear she has a dog radar, it's like she sniffs them out. And they love her. They just kind of… I don't know. Accept her into their pack. Chloe!" she calls, follows Dom over to join her daughter, still being smothered by four mismatched looking dogs. "Chloe, I've got you a mulled wine…"

"In a minute, Mum! You're so gorgeous, aren't you?" Chloe coos in her talking-to-dogs voice, although it's not entirely clear which of her new friends she's addressing. "And you are. And you are. And you are. And you're all so gentle, aren't you? Yes, you are. How have none of you got homes yet? Hey? I'd take you all home with me if I could. Yes, I would. Yes, I would, because you're gorgeous."

"You're not moving for a good half hour, are you?" Ange realises, rolls her eyes at Dom. "At least."

"But they're so cute, Mum. They just want all the attention, the Dogs Trust rep was just telling me they live in a shelter at the moment, so they don't get anywhere near enough human contact. Isn't that so sad?"

"You don't think maybe you could let someone else give them some attention? There are plenty of people here…"

"But they want to jump all over _me_, Mum. And I don't mind. And anyway, there are another two over there, look. They're from the Dogs Trust, too. So it's not like I'm hogging all the doggy cuddles. I didn't even try to orchestrate this, I promise, they all came to me. Do you all love me as much as I love you?" Chloe asks, reverts back to her dog voice. "Hey?"

"Shall we just leave you here and come back and get you in a bit?"

"Please?"

"Have you done all your Christmas shopping?"

"Of course I have. Just need to finish wrapping them, I've run out of pegs."

"Why do you need pegs?" Dom frowns in confusion.

"They're wooden ones." Chloe shuffles slightly, somehow manages to pull another of the dogs onto her lap, encourages the others back round to jump up on her shoulders, and Ange just can't get her head around how she can stand to have all of them pawing at her, licking her, shedding all over her at once. "I've got these amazing reusable Christmas patterned envelope things, and then you put the gifts in, fold the top over and peg it down, and it can all be kept and used again next year. It's genius."

"Were you put on this earth purely to make me feel bad about my loving bond with sticky tape?"

"I can get you some, too, if you want," Chloe offers. "It's so much easier. You'll never have to cut up wrapping paper and stick your fingers together with sticky tape ever again, _and_it's better for the environment. Everyone wins."

"Do you know what, when you put it like that. You've convinced me. I'd love some. You're still not getting me to give up meat, though."

"You'll cave eventually."

"So we're going to leave you with your new… friends and we'll come back and find you in a bit, then," Ange suggests- because as much as part of her wants to pull Chloe away, she's equally conscious that this is the most relaxed and at peace she's seen her since their visit to the abortion clinic. "Are you going to be alright?"

"She'll be fine, Ange. She's in dog lover heaven. Come on," Dom tugs on her hand gently, pulls her away. "I've still got my Secret Santa to buy."

"Who do you have?"

"Francesca on YAU."

"Oh, we can sort that here, easy. Anything with alcohol in it and she'll be happy. She's still in the F1, copious amounts of spirits needed at the weekends to get through back to back nightshifts stage. Or so I'm told."

"Because you never did that yourself, obviously."

"Of course not! I had Chloe. Couldn't go out and get plastered every weekend when I had her, could I?"

"But you were stupidly jealous of the rest of your year?"

"Now you're getting it."


End file.
